Thursday, July 07, 2016

Religious bigotry we haz that

Forget Islamophobia.

The real censored story in American history is anti Catholic bigotry. A lot of it was from years of anti Catholic propaganda in England, who saw Catholics as the enemy. The Calphate and ISIS fears have nothing over the fears of the Papacy and the evil Jesuits.

One of the great mysteries of the time, and something no historian has been able to fully explain, is how many of the anti-Catholic laws and attitudes simply disappeared from local and state governments. In part, this certainly had to do with the Carrolls and their high standing, and, in equal part, a unifying republican spirit descended upon all who opposed what was regarded as blatant British tyranny. During his two terms as president, George Washington—who never had time for bigotries based on accidents of birth or choices of religion—spent much of his time in office attempting to unify all American peoples under the common banner of republicanism. His letters to the Catholics of the United States as well as to the Hebrews of Newport remain documents of highest thought and repute, models of how to overcome and dispel bigotry.

things again got bad with the huge influx of Irish and Germans after the famines of the 1840's, and again after the influx of Eastern Europeans and Italians (and Jews) after the 1870's.

Many in the public sphere began to talk openly about a “papal takeover,” and even the level-headed of American society feared some kind of Vatican conspiracy to destroy the American republic from within and by her own laws and tolerance.

so the anti immigrant nonsense (mainly against Catholic Hispanics and Middle Eastern Muslims) spouted by the Trumpettes is another spouting of the hydra's head of religious/ethnic bigotry.

the problem this year, however, is that the progressives are in some ways worse, because they actually have enacted laws to stop these "foreign ideas" from being expressed in America:

. In large part, the American Progressive movement arose as a way to halt the further Catholicizing and Hebrewization (my made-up word) of America, desiring to “yank the hyphen out of hyphenated Americans.”In this, the progressives failed, though they did so while causing considerable harm to immigrant groups as well as to religious freedom. Since the 1960s, however, the progressives have continued to assault Catholics at nearly every level, especially against Catholic schools and hospitals.

from laws about bathrooms, requiring the hiring of active homosexuals in positions of authority, rules against hate speech, protesting segregated swimming pools, to insisting that Catholic institutions obey the latest Obamacare edicts on abortion (and in the near future, euthanasia).

so who do I vote for? A man who may hurt my feelings by his bigotry, or a woman who will continue the under reported "culture war" against religions that won't conform to the latest government fiat by an out of control and unelected federal bureaucracy, that regulates everything from bathrooms to school lunches to insisting that the Little Sisters of the Poor pay for abortion pills.